About my work. Notes 17.11.15
My abstract paintings use colour, shape, form and gestural marks.
This is not a depiction of a visual reality, nor a representation of an emotion. It is, perhaps, the evidence of a series of performances.
I have spent most of my life using words and certainly I love words, but I am aware that there is a method of communication that is wordless and without reference to a lexicon of imagery. Something sensually primordial.
Much like improvisational music my work contains harmonies, patterns, symmetries and counter symmetries. My aim is to attempt a degree of abstract purity by narrowing, distilling and intensifying gestural performance. My working methodology is to create a structure wherein chance can be allowed to flourish.
Expressionist artwork – intense colour and non-naturalistic manipulation of the paint based on my inner feelings – perhaps as an altenative pathway to a spiritual reality.
Influenced by Malevich’s Black Square which although non-representational still uses the language of geometry. I was very attracted to the idea of Suprematism both in the supremacy of colour in painting and the supremacy of emotion but I felt that there was a purer language than the geometric forms of the neo-plasticists. ( Like Piet Mondrian/Georges Braque/Lazlo Moholy-Nagy - the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour)
Influenced by Rothko, particularly the Seagram Murals and by Newman’s Stations of the cross, although I find the quasi-religioius spirituality and self-proclaimed importance of such work difficult to find in my own work.
More like Pollock, and very much more like Gerhard Richter’s abstract painting, particularly with regard to the repeated layering and revealing.
Existentialist – a painterly effect.
No fixed meaning – some viewers attach their own narrative to the work, nothing wrong with that.
There is a difference between READING and SEEING a work, the meaning of my work is in the seeing. They may be best experienced, rather than analysed.
They are visceral, indeed, it is my intention to bypass the intellect (in as much as that is possible) during the making of the work.
What are they about?
They are evidence of a series of performances. Visceral, wordless, gestural expressional performances without conscious narrative attempting to subvert intellectualism with ritual physicality.